Gitanjali Group gleans critical insight from data with help from SAS®

When the Gitanjali Group needed an integrated look at its customer and sales data, it turned to SAS Business Intelligence. Executives at the India-based integrated diamond and jewelry manufacturer and retailer now have a consistent view of company data, while the work of producing weekly financial reports has been reduced from a day to a few minutes.

“By implementing the SAS Business Intelligence solution, we have a ‘single source of truth’ we trust, and we are getting more accurate mission-critical information much more quickly than we used to,’’ explains Sam George, Chief Information Officer for the Gitanjali Group.

Gitanjali Group is a US$900 million integrated diamond and jewelry conglomerate, with a strong presence in India, the US and the Gulf states. This vertically integrated company operates at every level of the diamond business, from sourcing diamonds to retailing products through a vast network of self-owned and franchised stores. Gitanjali is a pioneer in jewelry branding in India with brands including Nakshatra, Gili, Asmi, Sangini, D’damas and Giantti.

At Gitanjali, the scale and complexity of operations has increased over the last few years, buoyed by acquisitions and internal growth. On the IT front, this has translated into an exponential increase in the amount of data coming from disparate sources. To manage this growing business efficiently, the company felt a strong need for a business intelligence platform that integrates information and presents a consolidated “single view of truth” quickly to aid management decision making.

Choosing SASGitanjali evaluated several BI vendors. SAS was chosen for several reasons. “SAS offers a comprehensive, fully integrated BI platform that is simple to use and provides fast access to data from disparate sources,” George explains. “We are also impressed by the full breadth of analytics offerings that SAS has, and therefore we see in SAS a vendor that can meet all our reporting and analytics requirements.”

Gitanjali took a step-by-step approach to deploying SAS. The first business to use SAS was the D’damas brand, which is available through more than 1,000 retailers in India. Before implementing SAS, the Information Systems team was having a tough time managing incoming data manually because of inconsistent reporting formats and varying levels of data quality. Manual cleansing, consolidation and standardization across departments was tedious and error-prone. “It was gradually becoming a nightmare to collate information from the individual departments and to translate that into a unified view for top management,” George says.

Preeti Choksi, President, Special Projects

“The bottom line is that we now have timely, reliable information available for us to act upon,’’ explains Preeti Choksi, President, Special Projects, and the prime mover behind this initiative. “I believe that, at the end of the day, SAS Business Intelligence will help empower our managers to act on this timely and reliable information, and thereby run the business more efficiently. We look forward to working with SAS and explore new avenues where analytics can help run our business more optimally.”

Gitanjali Group

Benefits:
A holistic standard reporting matrix that leads to one version of the truth. A weekly reporting project that took several finance staffers a day to complete can now be done in an hour. Executives get information faster and have more confidence in the data

“SAS offers a comprehensive BI platform that is simple to use and quick to deploy. By using SAS, we now have accurate information available in time for our managers to act upon. Leveraging this timely and accurate information should translate into higher business efficiencies.”